Emergency at New Orleans' 911 center: An editorial

People dial 911 when they need help, most of them urgently, and having to wait a while for an operator to answer is the last thing they expect. But that's what many New Orleanians are facing during emergencies -- and that's a distressing deficiency.

DAVID GRUNFELD / THE TIMES-PICAYUNEA large crowd gathers for the opening of a new Orleans Parish 911 Center on City Park Avenue in March. Low staffing levels, however, have left many callers waiting for more than a minute for operators to respond.

Severe understaffing at the city's 911 call center has left hundreds of New Orleanians each month waiting more than a minute for their call to be answered, according to an internal report. In a few cases, the report said, callers have waited more than eight minutes for someone to answer the phone -- an eternity in an emergency.

That's simply unacceptable, and city officials need to fix it.

The report by the Orleans Parish Communication District, the agency that maintains and monitors the 911 service, warned that "a major incident could overload" the system and "hamper the city's ability to respond to that and other emergencies." That's a dire scenario in a city that faces the threat of hurricanes and requires a major evacuation every few years.

Yet New Orleans' 911 service has fallen well below national standards. Those standards suggest at least 90 percent of calls should be answered within 10 seconds and at least 95 percent within 20 seconds. In New Orleans 98 percent of calls were answered in 10 seconds or less in April 2010. But by December, the report said, only 89 percent of calls were answered in 20 seconds or less. Among the hundreds of callers who had to wait longer that month, five people were on the line for at least eight minutes before they reached a dispatcher.

New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas laid off almost half of the department 911 operators last year as the city faced a massive budget shortfall. But the superintendent and Mayor Mitch Landrieu need to explore ways to shore up the 911 call center.

Col. Jerry Sneed, the city's deputy mayor for public safety, said the city has assigned dispatchers from the Fire Department to serve as backup to 911 operators. But Col. Sneed said the long-term solution is to consolidate and cross-train dispatchers. He said the city is working toward that effort, and officials need to get that done.

Col. Sneed suggested that the communication district could help the city, saying the district is "an incredibly well-funded organization which has the capacity to provide the necessary resources and staffing" for the 911 center. The district, an entity of the state, supplies the building and equipement for the 911 center and the city is supposed to provide the personnel. The district gave $150,000 to the NOPD last summer and, considering the city's tight budget, the two sides should work together to try to address New Orleans deficiencies.

New Orleanians have repeatedly said in recent surveys that public safety, especially violent crime, is their No. 1 priority. Having enough resources and personnel to fight crime on the streets is vital to getting a grip on the violence. But it's also important to make sure people don't wait in line when they call to report crime or to seek medical or other type of emergency assistance.

This requires finding a balance on how to use the city's public service resources -- and the report on the 911 service shows the city hasn't quite found that balance yet.